An award-winning elementary school teacher writes the third part in something of a debate on the Atlanta test cheating scandal and what/who is to blame when educators cheat on student standardized tests.

The D.C. Council's Education Committee will discuss the standardized test cheating scandal at a previously scheduled hearing on Thursday that, ironically, was intended to be about about test security .

A Rhode Island state senator was one of the first of some 50 adults who have agreed to take a version of the state's standardized test, part of an action aimed at protesting a new high school testing graduation requirement that students say is unfair.

Seattle high school teachers who are refusing to give students a state standardized test that they say is fatally flawed now face sanctions, and students are taking the test this week by order of state officials who ordered administrators to administer it.

A boycott of Washington state's mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers' unions, parents, researchers and education activists.

Guess who thinks there's more than one problem with the SAT? David Coleman, the man who was recently selected to run the organization that owns the SAT, says he has issues withthe essay section. Here's a look at Coleman and what else he said.

Here we go again. New international test scores were released today and their meaning are in the eye of the interpreter. Here are some headlines from different new sites with some different takes on the results -- and one headline you didn't see but should.

People such as Bill Gates and Arne Duncan who say teacher experience doesn't matter much are relying on standardized test scores for evidence, even though the tests fail to provide adequate evidence for drawing such a conclusion.

A principal asks the Kansas state commissioner of education to replace the entire student body at high school with students from another high school where test scores are higher. Yes, it's fake news, and yes, you will laugh and cry.

Q) How did Shanghai students, participating in a high-profile international exam for the first time, able to land at the top of the math, reading and science rankings? A) An obsession with test taking, to the exclusion of a lot of other things. Diane Ravitch and Yong Zhao explain.

An educator writes that policymakers are fetishizing student scores on standardized tests and using them as a crutch rather than turning to sensible solutions to improve public schools. There are better ways to assess teacher quality, he says.

A teacher explains how an obsession with data has led to the redefinition of teaching and learning: "Teaching itself has become redefined as generating, collecting, and using data, and learning has become redefined as the curve connecting data points. This is a fundamental shift in how educators think, talk, and go about educating our children. Unfortunately, it is not a shift that serves anyone but the data-collectors very well."

An English teacher writes: "Strict adherence to data-driven instruction can lead schools to push aside science and social studies to drill students on isolated reading benchmarks.... It is difficult to teach kids to read well if they don’t learn to enjoy reading. It is impossible to teach kids to read well while denying them the knowledge they need to make sense of complex material. Following the data often forces teachers to do just that."

Education historian Diane Ravitch writes: "...Value-added assessment should not be used at all. Never. It has a wide margin of error. It is unstable. A teacher who is highly effective one year may get a different rating the next year depending on which students are assigned to his or her class. Ratings may differ if the tests differ. To the extent it is used, it will narrow the curriculum and promote teaching to tests. Teachers will be mislabeled and stigmatized. Many factors that influence student scores will not be counted at all."

For more than 80 years, the SAT has been the nation’s dominant, standardized college admissions exam. This year – for the first time – as many students in the high school class of 2010 sat for the rival ACT as took the SAT. How did it happen?

For those who follow test scores, here's a new study of five years of assessment trends showing that U.S. 4th and 8th graders are doing better in reading and math than they were in 2005. It’s not just according to the states’ own tests used for No Child Left Behind accountability, but also according to the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress.

A Columbia University teacher writes about the problems with our faith our standardized test scores: "Yes, we 'just' need better tests. But creating better tests is very hard and very expensive. And in a system as vast and complex as ours, it’ll be tempting to continue using tests that can be graded quickly and that don’t look very different from the ones we now use. But without a radically different approach to standardized testing in this country, we are unlikely to get different results."

On the heels of a fiasco in Florida with scoring the state achievement tests, NCS Pearson has a new scoring problem, this time in Minnesota. Here's a list of similar problems, underscoring why using standardized test scores for high-stakes decisions is wrong.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has a problem, and it’s not the fact that elementary school standardized test scores just went down (at, it is worth noting, a bad time for Mayor Adrian Fenty, who appointed her and is seeking re-election).

Good news: Texas schoolchildren performed better on the 2010 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills this year than they did last, according to preliminary results released this month. Bad news: It turns out that students could pass the test answering fewer questions correctly than in 2009.

Florida’s Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith has blasted NCS Pearson for a big delay in the reporting of the results of the 2010 Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, saying that he is “outraged” and calling it “absolutely unacceptable.”

Is there nothing in education today that we do not feel the need to justify through improved standardized test scores? A new report is out about physical education in public schools. The news is not good.

Maybe there is a lesson in this for American teachers. Saying that they are sick and tired of forcing kids to take standardized tests, thousands of teachers in England are refusing to administer high-stakes standardized tests in English and math this week.

If you have any doubt just how obsessed folks in the greater Washington D.C. area are with getting their children into college, you need look no further than the Washington Post’s list of best-selling books.

Florida's teachers are already outraged about legislation expected to become law that would end tenure, require the creation of more standardized tests and link teacher pay to test scores. Now there's a bill that would allow corporations contribute money to a fund that provides school vouchers and then deduct it from their taxes.

Scores of testing centers where thousands of students were planning to take the ACT college admissions exam tomorrow have closed because of the massive storm marching up the East Coast.
The website has a long list of sites that have been closed and will post the new date when it becomes available.

The National Board of Medical Examiners denied a request by medical student Frederick Romberg to have extra time to take the United States Medical Licensing Examination. Romberg is a 41-year-old student at Yale Medical School who has been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. He is appealing the decision. Here is what Romberg told the board, and what the board told him. How would you decide the case? ... It wasn't until he was an adult that he finally learned what was causing his academic difficulties. A professor asked him why he was taking so much longer than anyone else to finish a 10-question quiz.

“On the SAT, if you’re brilliant and slow - you’ll get a very average score.”--test expert Edward Carroll Edward Carroll takes tests for a living. To be precise, he takes the SAT, the dreaded college admissions test owned by the...